Continuity
- Thread starter PrimeDirective
- Start date
That may not be the intended meaning, but that's the way some of it is coming across.
Fuck-ups, I can certainly understand. I'm just not buying the "well, if the story is good enough..." excuse, because I have yet to see a story that messed with continuity that was ever "good enough" to forgive the transgression, and usually would've been made better if the author had stuck to continuity and figured out a more imaginative way out of the corner he'd written himself into. Especially with the resources we have nowadays.
To be fair, I'm mainly talking about the screwed up episodes from the Bragaberman era, because my novel consumption isn't nearly what it used to be.
As has been stated more than a few times, it's not the final arbiter of whether or not it's a good, worthwhile story, but it can make the difference of whether or not it's a good Star Trek story.
best example I can think of? Crucible: McCoy. It was contracted to follow onscreen 'canon' only, and it certainly contradicted some of the materials published earlier, but it was (in my opinion) the most powerful character study novel in Star Trek ever. Would it have the same emotional impact if the book kept itself consistent with the rest of the published book on the good doctor, absolutely not, in my opinion.
As an outsider looking in on Star Wars tie-ins (not a fan of the films, don't read the books), from what you've all said it seems the "sorta-canon" of the books is, in fact, a total sham to keep the obsessives buying them, when they actually have the same "worth" to the big picture as the Trek books do. Or am I missing something? Do the books get referenced in the films and cartoons? Or is it the same "reverse continuity" as the Trek books, where an event (like the Tomed Incident or the Romulan War) is mentioned on screen, then later fleshed out on paper?
The "many worlds" hypothesis is a real scientific hypothesis, yes. But it is a hypothesis that argues that wavefunctions are not collapsed; it is not a hypothesis that argues that anything ever imagined by any person must be real somewhere.
Star Trek is not and has never been and will never be real. Amongst other things, the laws of physics in the Star Trek Universe are too different from those of the real world for the Star Trek Universe to have ever been created in the "Many Worlds" model.
And yet, you specifically mentioned some "Great Star Trek Novel" and Hugo awards and whatever while attempting to make your point. As you said, "That may not be the intended meaning, but that's the way some of it is coming across."
Only if you hold to the stance that everything has to fit into the same continuity box. There are great Star Wars, Batman, Superman, King Arthur, Robin Hood, and James Bond stories (to name examples off the top of my head) which are wholly incompatible with other aspects of their respective mythos, and which remain great Star Wars, Batman, Superman, King Arthur, Robin Hood, and James Bond stories.
Since Rosalind already cited it as an example, we'll use Crucible. Are you seriously telling me that it isn't a good Star Trek story simply because it takes its lead only from the filmed material and purposely does not tie into other novels (at least to any meaningful degree)? Another example: the fan-favorite Strangers from the Sky, or even Federation. Neither works anymore with respect to "canon" because of events which have superceded them, but they remain solid Star Trek stories.
Going with the other logic, any Klingon story in any medium produced after 1970 automatically has a ding against it because it ignores or is "cavalier" with the events surrounding the Klingons as shown in Spock Must Die! That includes stories overseen by The Great Bird himself. What's wrong with this picture?
Sure, there have been tie-ins written by show staffers (the TMP novelization by Roddenberry, Vulcan's Glory and The Enterprise Experiment by D. C. Fontana, Mosaic and Pathways by Jeri Taylor, Section 31: Abyss co-written by David Weddle, Age of the Empress co-written by Mike Sussman), and there have been Trek novelists who went on to work on the staffs of Trek shows (Melinda Snodgrass, Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens) along with freelancers who have done both (David Gerrold, Diane Duane, David Mack, John Ordover, David Bischoff).
And "support" isn't even an issue. The producers can be as supportive as they want of the tie-ins, in terms of valuing them as a promotional tool and a variant approach to an imaginary creation, even as an occasional source of ideas (the now-canonical first names of Sulu, Uhura, and Kirk's parents all came from the books, as did the concept of the Klingon Day of Honor). But that still doesn't make it practical to treat tie-in material as something that's binding upon canon. It's hard enough to keep a canon consistent when the showrunner is overseeing a staff of half a dozen writer-producers who break the storylines together in the same room day in and day out. But trying to stay consistent with something as separate from that process as novels written by freelance authors all over the country working alone in their homes or offices or local coffee shops and overseen by an editor in Manhattan? That's a harder thing to do. It's the sort of thing that can be assigned to someone in the studio licensing office who has the responsibility of keeping the tie-ins consistent with what the production staff is doing, but that licensing exec is able to do that because he or she doesn't also have to do the already-overwhelming work of developing a season's worth of TV episodes that are filmable, within budget, and hopefully reasonably consistent within themselves. It would simply be prohibitive to combine the two responsibilities, particularly for a novel line as prolific as Star Trek's.
That's why even the novels written by show staffers are rarely counted as canonical. Even Roddenberry didn't bother to be consistent with his own TMP novelization when he did TNG. Jeri Taylor kept consistent with her novels while she ran VGR, but her successors didn't. It's got nothing to do with whether the producers are willing to "support" the novels as a creative endeavor. It's just that the nature and logistics of the business prohibit that endeavor from being integral with the endeavor of producing the show.
This is why, despite all the convoluted "levels of canon" labels that Lucasfilm has concocted, the Star Wars tie-ins are still a separate entity from the films and shows. It's why tie-ins are always a second tier. It's not a value judgment, not a lack of support that could be avoided or corrected in an ideal world; it's just the way it works.
The fact is, Star Trek's continuity has always been a mess. The original series was making up its universe as it went along, so it's full of inconsistencies. Does the ship hold 200 people or 400? Is Spock a Vulcan or a Vulcanian? Does the ship report to Space Central, UESPA, or Star Fleet? Are they lithium crystals or dilithium, and do they power the ship or just channel its power? Are they 200 years in the future or 700? And with all the various spinoffs and sequels overseen by so many different people with such different visions of the universe, it's surprising that it has as much of an illusion of consistency as it does.
But in a way, it's fitting. Star Trek celebrates infinite diversity in infinite combination. And its overall body of work incorporates considerable diversity. It's not all one uniform thing, but many different things combining, often clashing, yet managing to work as a dynamic if messy whole. Maybe that's why it touches people so deeply, and why fans argue so much over it. It has so many different identities that it speaks to many different people in different ways. They see the Trek universe as the cohesive whole they want it to be because it's such a melange that they can cherrypick whatever they want to see in it.
So the various tie-ins with their inconsistent approaches are just an elaboration on that inherent diversity of viewpoints and visions. Instead of being just one thing, they're many things and include something for every taste.
A lot of characters, species, planets, and such in the onscreen Star Wars universe originated in the books and comics. Coruscant, the Trantor-like homeworld of the Empire, was introduced in Timothy Zahn's novel trilogy that began the modern "Expanded Universe." Aayla Secura, the sexy blue Twi'lek Jedi, was introduced in the Dark Horse comics, and when Lucas saw the character, he decided to stick her in Attack of the Clones as a bit player. And so on.
The thing is, the actual quantity of onscreen Star Wars material is tiny compared to the quantity of onscreen Star Trek material. So that gives Lucas more time to pay attention to the tie-ins, and it means that the ratio of tie-in characters and concepts to onscreen ones is higher. So it's more likely for such borrowings to happen in SW than in ST. Even so, the SW novels are essentially treated the same as ST novels with respect to the onscreen canon: as something that can be mined for ideas or contradicted as needed, rather than something binding on the screen material.
Absolutely right. The Many Worlds interpretation doesn't mean that every conceivable reality actually does happen. It only allows for things that are actually physically possible and statistically valid. For instance, if you fall off a cliff, the timeline could then diverge into one where you land face-down and one where you land face-up, but there's not going to be a timeline where you sprout cartoon wings and fly to safety. Indeed, the MWI doesn't even require that every physically possible reality must happen -- only that the total number of quantum realities is greater than one. If you're driving to a particular destination and have to turn left at an intersection to get there, there may be alternate realities in which you get to the intersection before the light changes or after the light changes, or one where you brake in time to avoid a collision and one where you don't, but there's unlikely to be a timeline where you turn right instead, because even though it's physically possible, there's no reason why you would.
So there's certainly no way in which the MWI means that every work of fiction is real in some parallel realm. That may be the way it works in Flash comic books from the '60s, but that's not the way it works in real physics.
Um, no. The novel line is there to make more money by telling more stories set in the Star Trek Universe (or, now, Universes). The novels pre-date fanfic (or, at least, the widespread distribution of fanfic), and, frankly, is much, much better than most fanfic because it has the advantage of being written by professionals who've been vetted by actual editors.
^ Trek fanfic's been around pretty much since the beginning, but you're right in that it didn't enjoy anything resembling widespread distribution until later.
Still, let's try to avoid a "fanfic vs profic" thing, if at all possible. While there's certainly some really bad fanfic (I should know...I've written some of it), there are also more than a few gems out there. Comparing and/or contrasting the two really isn't germane to the topic.
We now return you to your regularly-scheduled program, still in progress.
Still, let's try to avoid a "fanfic vs profic" thing, if at all possible. While there's certainly some really bad fanfic (I should know...I've written some of it), there are also more than a few gems out there. Comparing and/or contrasting the two really isn't germane to the topic.
We now return you to your regularly-scheduled program, still in progress.
Attention to detail is one part of what makes a story of high quality. And while attention to detail includes awareness of continuity and consistency, it also includes the ability to recognize when certain details need to be ignored or glossed over for the sake of the quality of the whole.
Come to think of it, PrimeDirective, there's a contradiction in your argument. If you're willing to believe that the Star Trek universe coexists alongside ours, why can't you believe that there are many parallel versions of the Star Trek universe and that the different continuities in Trek fiction are all equally "real" in parallel timelines?
Come to think of it, PrimeDirective, there's a contradiction in your argument. If you're willing to believe that the Star Trek universe coexists alongside ours, why can't you believe that there are many parallel versions of the Star Trek universe and that the different continuities in Trek fiction are all equally "real" in parallel timelines?
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Really?
So tell me, PrimeDirective: Did Kent shave his beard or not in King Lear?
My apologies if my comment came off as suggesting a fanfic v. profic thing. I don't even read fanfic (which indeed dates back to the 70s). What I intended to communicate is that ultimately TPTB don't give a rat's tail about continuity (and by TPTB I don't mean the editors or writers, I mean the suits), but they do care about an exploitable market. They can't make money off of fanfic, so it was in their interest to have "official" work produced (and I'm thankful for it).
^I profoundly doubt the emergence of original Trek fiction was a response to fanfiction. It was a pretty standard practice in the 1960s to publish original novels based on television series, and that was before fanfiction really emerged as a significant thing. So yes, it's about making an additional profit, but countering fanfiction had nothing to do with it.
I think I'm going to have to line my books according to timelines. TOS first...then TNG...DS9...Voy...Post Nemesis. Then I'll have to put the Abramsverse novels on a seperate shelf with post-it arrows showing where it branches off. STO novel(s) will have to be on yet another shelf although I'm not sure to which line I should connect them. And then there's the mirror universe ones.....hmmmm....maybe I'll put them on the back of the bookshelf. I think that's the only way I can keep my continuities straight.
I see the point of confusion now.
From my perspective, the only thing a given author should keep track of is the onscreen stuff, and any previous work that author has contributed; the rest can go hang. As far as I'm concerned, each author creates his own alternate timeline with each novel he writes; how much or how little they toe the line with all the other alternate timelines other authors are creating is a whole 'nother can o' gagh; adhering to other novels, that's a bonus when it happens, but trying to keep track of all that is enough to drive you bugfuck nuts. I'm picky, not obsessive.
To get specific, the only other books you and Kevin should keep track of is your own and those that directly impact on the backstory of them, like the SCE and Vanguard novels. If you want to tack on some Rhiannsu or Shatnerverse stuff, that's entirely on you. By the same token, the only stuff Shatner and the Reeves-Steven's should worry about is, again, onscreen continuity (something that they do a good job at, and one of the reasons I enjoy those novels) and what they've set up in their own books. Anything beyond that is completely optional and they should feel perfectly free to ignore.
That work better?
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I've enjoyed DC Comics Star Trek Annual #1, Enterprise: The First Adventure, and Star Trek (2009)--all telling the tale of Kirk and company's first adventure on the Enterprise--all contradicting each other. In the same way I can enjoy Superman the Movie, John Byrne's Man of Steel miniseries, and Geoff Johns Superman: Secret Origin. Or Camelot, Excaliber, and The Once and Future King.
They're all just stories. The only thing I ask is that stories be consistent within themselves (as much as possible).
Star Trek, as a whole, is not a story. It's a setting where lots of different people have told lots of different stories.
They're all just stories. The only thing I ask is that stories be consistent within themselves (as much as possible).
Star Trek, as a whole, is not a story. It's a setting where lots of different people have told lots of different stories.
^ Nicely said.
Well, this -- in general terms -- is what we've been saying all along, so...you know...welcome to the party.
That said, for the books, we do work to remain consistent with what other writers have done, except in those instances where we're told specifically, "Don't worry what Book X did; I want you to do something different." The Shatner books are an example of that; they always did their own thing, and the rest of us were told to leave them in their own bubble.
Speaking only for myself, I wouldn't simply sit at my desk and say, "Screw what ______ did in his/her book." If there's other stuff out there that bumps up, even in the most casual fashion, with something I'm going to be covering in a book I'm writing, I'll check out the other work and see what the overlap is. I did that with Kevin Ryan for the last Vanguard book I wrote, and (for a current example) I did it with the Typhon Pact I'm writing when I reached out to Christopher and James Swallow. They'd mentioned something in passing in their respective Titan books that touches on a plot point in my book, and I wanted to be sure everything lined up.
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